Star Citizen Drama

So The Escapist has published a pretty racy article criticizing Cloud Imperium Games, the creators of Star Citizen. The article sourced 9 different current and former employees of CIG. It contained multiple allegations including racial discrimination, misappropriated funds (Star Citizen is completely crowdfunded to the tune of $90 million), a “toxic workplace,” and claims that the developer has bled through nearly 90% of its resources, with feature creep killing the game.

This wouldn’t be newsworthy if it wasn’t for CIG’s response, which was a formal letter outlining how the Escapist article was slander. The letter from CIG states that they intend to “turn this matter over to our litigators to prepare legal action in the US and the UK against the individuals and entities involved […]” if The Escapist doesn’t meet their demands by end of business hours on October 5. The Escapist’s managing editor John Keefer published a follow-up article explaining in detail how each source was vetted, emphasizing that they were all passed through their legal department for verification.

Grab your popcorn…

More

World of Warcraft: Legion

Blizzard announced the next World of Warcraft expansion today at Gamescom. World of Warcraft: Legion will be the MMO’s 6th expansion and will bringing back some familiar faces along with some new zones and lore.

Some features we gather from the trailer are:

  • New Hero Class – Demon Hunter!
  • New Continent – The Broken Isles
  • Artifact Weapons
  • Class Order Halls
  • Adventure to Level 110
  • New Dungeons and Raids
  • New Honor System
  • Beta begins later this year.

(more…)

More

WoW at 5.6 Million Subscribers

Tucked away in a Yahoo Finance article that shines a light on Activision Blizzard’s successful second quarter is a line that may or may not be a shock to you.

Though World of Warcraft® ended the quarter at 5.6 million subscribers, Blizzard revenues are up year-over-year based on strong performance across the expanding Blizzard portfolio. On June 23, 2015, Blizzard Entertainment released, Fury of Hellfire, one of the largest non-expansion content updates to date for World of Warcraft. This new content helped stabilize the subscriber number towards the end of the quarter. World of Warcraft remains the No. 1 subscription‐based MMORPG in the world.

The days of 10 million subscribers is long long gone it seems as WoW currently has about half that number now. It still remains the largest subscription-based MMORPG game at 5.6 million, but at the rate it seems to be declining, it shouldn’t be long before it’s surpassed. We’ll find out shortly what the future holds for World of Warcraft when they reveal the next expansion at Gamescom that starts tomorrow and lasts for 3 days.

More